Ambassadors of Culture
About 145 miles south-east of Middlebury College, Amherst was the temporary home of a rising young female scholar in the early 1970’s. Newly married to a Palestinian poet, Radwa Ashour left her native Egypt by herself half a century ago to stoically pursue her doctoral work on Afro-American literature. Among her various works, Al-Rihla, which is the required book for this course, is a portrayal of her impressions, reflections, reactions, frustrations, political leanings and engagements during her sojourn in Amherst. It depicts, among numerous other things, her life in a women's dorm, roommates Louise and Annita, the debates and disputes she engaged in during the war that broke out in the Middle East, her first encounter with a professor displaying Che Guevara’s photo whom the widow of activist Du Bois advised her to meet, Picasso's famous 'Guernica,' which she saw at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and how she consequently relates the history of its massive suffering to Boston’s, her take on the American and French revolutions in addition to vivid descriptions of Boston and New York from the perspective of a keen 'alien' observer of the epoch. Al-Rihla's chapters lend themselves to students' individual class presentations whereby they also collectively engage in discussions and debates as they use the book as a springboard to expand on the events it portrays and make inferences. While Al-Rihla will make up the bulk of the work, essays by other ambassadors of culture will be introduced like Ameen Rihani’s depiction of the newly-inaugurated Brooklyn Bridge in New York and how the author relates the event to freedom in the Arab World, most of which was then under Ottoman rule. Pertinent video material and documentaries from Al-Jazeera and other Arabic satellite TV can be incorporated in class work.